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St Paul,
Hellesdon, Norwich

St Paul is quite possibly the most
unusual church in the city. It sits in the heart of the
maze of streets of the vast Hellesdon housing estate, and
if you did not know what to look for you would not come
across it by accident. The frontage is an elegant
seven-edged red brick semi-circle, but it is only when
you go behind this that you see the facade has been added
to a dark green corrugated iron nissen hut.

I hadn't
really expected that it would be possible to see inside,
but I need not have worried. A senior citizens coffee
morning was on, and they seemed to be having a whale of a
time. The man in charge was very happy for me to go
inside and take a look. Most of the chairs were stacked
up in the little chancel, and the cheerful bunch, about
fifty or so of them I should think, were sitting around
tables in the nave.

There
was a certain amount of jolly banter when people
saw my camera, and one lady expressed her
disappointment when I said I was taking a
photograph of the building rather than of her. In
fact, what really drew my eye and my camera was
the feature which is the highlight of St Paul,
apart from the people of course. This is the
1950s window by the William Morris workshop of
Westminster. It depicts the Risen Christ in
Glory. In all honesty, it is by no means the best
post-war window in Norfolk, but it stands out in
this humble place as an adornment and an act of
witness. The ladies I spoke to certainly seemed
to like it.

I expect that St Paul's
dedication is a result of the destruction of the
medieval St Paul in the Norwich blitz in 1942. It
is a chapel of ease to the medieval church of St
Mary, which is set away from the hubbub of
Hellesdon in the old village beyond the Drayton
Road, more than a mile away. I imagine that it
would be possible to live here and not even know
that the mother church existed.